The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories

THE RISE & FALL OF THE SCANDAMERICAN DOMESTIC

COPYRIGHT
© 2014 by Christopher Merkner

COVER AND BOOK DESIGN
by Linda Koutsky

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© PhotoDisc, Inc.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION

Merkner, Christopher.

[Short stories. Selections]

The rise & fall of the Scandamerican domestic : stories / by Christopher Merkner.—First edition.

pages cm

ISBN
978-1-56689-344-2 (
E
-
BOOK
)

1. Scandinavian Americans—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction, American. I. Title. II. Title: Rise and fall of the Scandamerican domestic : stories.

PS
3613.
E
7567
R
57 2014

813'.6—
DC
23

2013003664

FIRST EDITION
|
FIRST PRINTING

FOR MOLLY

CONTENTS

Of Pigs and Children

Check the Baby

In Lapland

Local Accident

Scandamerican Domestic

Direct Assault from South Sweden

Time in Norrmalmstorg

When Our Son, 26, Brings Us His First Girlfriend

O Sweet One in the Bluff

The Cook at Swedish Castle

Please Keep Something out of Fountains

Tomtens

When Our Son, 36, Asks Us for What He Calls a Small Loan

We Have Them to Raise Us

Cabins

Scandamerican Pastoral

Last Cottage

If Swedish intercourse is problematic and the “model society” surprisingly unsociable, the Swede is perhaps unique in often being able to feel more at his ease among foreigners than among his own kith and kin.

—
PAUL BRITTEN AUSTIN
,
on being Swedish

The Swedes in America cannot be considered a people; they could only be material . . .

—
ARTHUR LANDFORS
, “
POET IN SWEDISH AMERICA
”

OF PIGS AND CHILDREN

L
ife seduces from afar. This is a French concept I believe, though I have never been to France and can speak no French and have never been exposed to any French literature that might corroborate this sensation I have about things in the world becoming more attractive, more alluring, the further away one gets from them—

And really, with every story my mother forces on me about her pig, I am happily finding myself slipping further and further away from her kitchen table. I have no interest in what she has to say about this pig; I am thinking instead of my dead uncle. I am thinking about having accidentally gaffed him in the temple with one of my musky bucktails on a very simple and heaving backcast, and the problem here, as I see it, is this: I am feeling an unexpected
excitement in not telling my mother about her brother's death. It is exciting me to withhold this information. The longer I wait, the longer I sit here listening to her speak, the further away I get from her and the trauma I have undergone, the more satisfied I feel.

It's curious.

I could easily tell her, of course. The death was not my fault. I am not guilty of any heinous crime. I have not fulfilled some secret vendetta against my uncle. I can come away clean.

But at some point, if I continue to say nothing about having killed her brother, she will want to know how the man disappeared. She will call the police; there will be a manhunt; I will be questioned, as I am the last known person to have been seen with him, and less than twenty-four hours ago; I will confess everything I know to the police; I will
appear
guilty of a heinous crime; and I will be hung, or shot, or put away in a cage forever. And let me make this emphatically clear: this appeals to me, very much. I like this possibility. I find pleasure in
not
telling her about her brother's death because part of me—a pressing and primal and mysterious
part of me—is curiously drawn to the prospect of being guilty of something for which I am technically not guilty.

But still—

This pig of hers, of which she has been talking for the past half hour, is in my lap. I am petting it. It is a Vietnamese potbelly, which were apparently very popular about seven or eight years ago in the upscale suburban circles of Madison and Chicago, but have since fallen by the wayside, for people like my mother to pick up at rural flea markets at next to no cost.

This is the type of drivel my mother is trying to meaningfully convey to me as I begin removing myself from her severe and penetrating face. She has not asked why I have arrived at her house so early on a Sunday morning. She has asked me nothing of myself. But she pauses in her steady, tight-lipped monologue and expects me to respond to her.

“Well, that is an interesting thought,” I say to her, though to be sure, I only have the most general sense of what she has been saying.

“You know,” she replies, “it
is
an interesting thing to say, because the wildest thing about it is
that I'm pretty sure she understands me the same way I understand her. We understand each other, you see.”

“You understand each other,” I repeat. She is in her thick gray bathrobe, the one she has worn all my life, pulled tightly to her neck.

“I think it's as plain as day, really,” my mother confides. “Anyone with eyes and who is honest with themselves will see that she is
the
most demonstrative pig they have ever laid eyes on.” I don't know what my mother means exactly by
demonstrative
, but I'd be willing to bet that if she means that this pig shows a lot of expression in its face, or that the pig wears, as the saying goes, its heart out on its sleeve, well then I guess I might rightly call my uncle Ackvund, at the moment when he understood he had a twelve-inch musky lure sticking through his eye socket,
demonstrative
.

Helpless
, though, seems to be the more fitting adjective. In fact, I don't honestly know what
helpless
is, if it isn't the image of poor Ackvund swatting aimlessly at his entire face, patting his cheeks and forehead like a blind man searching the ground for pocket change until (and I'd be lying if I said that I
hadn't seen this coming) he hooked one of his fingers on the same hook that was projecting out of his eye. The barb, then, if you can picture this, went right through the fingernail—

A
shish kabob
is what some of you city people with no conscience might call it. But I think
helpless
is really the word I want here.

“Well, that's another interesting point,” I say to my mother, when she hesitates between sentences again.

She squints at me.

“It is,” I assure her.

“What did I just say to you?”

“About the pig,” I say. “About Lala. That was a really good point you made.”

“Well it
is
a good point, because I just don't think enough people realize that these animals, and most animals for that matter, have a remarkable sense of hearing. They hear marvelously. And they
listen
—oh, they listen. I've seen this one turn her head to me and seriously think about, or at least
look
like she's seriously thinking about—”

My mother laughs at this point and looks affectionately at the warm beast in my lap. She becomes
earnest again and continues. “She
seriously
thinks about what it is I've just told her.” I am petting this pig as my mother begins another story. Her hard head (the pig's hard head) has some hairs on it that feel like metal wires and other hairs that are really quite soft. The pig's eyes are closed and it is snoring.

I am attracted to this animal in a strange and strong way. Its warm body, I think, is what appeals to me most right now. It is making my thighs sweaty. Its eyes are closed. Its head is propped against my hip with arrogance and nonchalance. It is breathing slowly.

It is snoring. It is encouraging me to relax.

And it is important that I relax, I think, because I have not done so since the moment I first stood up in the boat and looked at my uncle, and he, blood flowing down his cheek, looked helplessly back at me. Recalling this moment even now, I have to say, undoes much of what this pig has been doing for me by way of relaxation—

Oh I tried to help him, of course.
I
wasn't the helpless, demonstrative one. I didn't balk. I didn't blanch. Not at first. I wasn't by any means
paralyzed
. In fact, I moved toward him immediately and
tried to calm his violent and, as I said, aimless patting of his own face. But I couldn't stop him until it was too late, until he had stuck his finger all the way through the hook, past the barb. When I finally did get my hands on him, I attempted to comfort him by rubbing his shoulders, as if he had caught a chill. This was instinctive, and for many obvious reasons it not only did
not
calm him down, it actually prompted a litany of anguished wails, the most coherent of which was, “Get it out. It itches. Like Jesus Christ. Get it out.”

“Well,” I say to my mother, when she has stopped talking again, “I don't know.”

“What don't you know?”

“I don't know what to say about that,” I say. I look at the gray kitchen in which I was raised. Not a basket has once been removed from the wall, not a framed picture altered or updated. Dust covers everything.

“Say about what?”